American Journal of Nursing‘s Jacob Molyneux writes about the nurses who were arrested while protesting a lack of representation for those who support a single-payer health care system at a Senate Finance Committee meeting about health care reform.
In his blog post, Molyneux points out that some people and organizations say the press isn’t giving adequate coverage to the single-payer option.
Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) published a media advisory in March that said out of “hundreds” of news stories, only 18 mentioned the single-payer option. FAIR’s advisory fails to tell us exactly how many “hundreds” of stories it searched and the full study doesn’t appear to be on the organization’s Web site.
The “Report on Health Care Community Discussions” on HealthReform.gov says that 27 percent of the groups participating “discussed the merits of a single-payer system, and the majority of those groups supported this idea.” The report does note that “Supporters of a single-payer system submitted numerous reports, in part due to the encouragement by advocacy groups to participate in Health Care Community Discussions.”
At a town-hall meeting last week, President Obama said “if he were building the health care system from scratch, a single-payer system would be the best approach.”
So, health journalists: Have you been reporting on the single-payer option? Why or why not? Feel free to point out coverage you find worthwhile.
